Technically, there is an art to making a great cup of coffee.

By that I mean there is much more to it than just simply “putting the coffee on to brew.”  In my office, I have a magnet from Starbucks that describes The Four Fundamentals:  How to make a great cup of coffee.  And, what is funny is that in a lot of ways, it also relates to making education great.  How?  Join me on the adventure of the next few paragraphs and let’s explore this concept together.  At the end of today’s story, hopefully, we will have found the ingredients to make our educational journey great (or at least better).  If not, at least we will have the knowledge to make a great cup of coffee.

According to Starbucks, the Four Fundamentals of making a great cup of coffee are…

FRESHNESS

Coffee:  To maintain flavor, store beans at room temperature in an opaque, airtight container.

Education:  To keep your journey fresh, maintain structure yet allow room for flexibility.  Chart your course toward a determined destination, yet allow room for exploration along the way.  Understand too that each child will arrive at the destination having taken their own course.  Some will take the route most direct, others will wander along paths to the point you may even think they are lost.  Take time to travel those paths with them — and for those that wander, before you decide they are lost, see if they are merely charting a more scenic route.

Give them a voice in what that charted course should look like.  The journey itself is just as important as the destination.  Too many times people remain focused on where they are going rather than taking time to appreciate where they are and remember where they have been. 

For coffee, freshness pertains to proper storage.  For education, freshness pertains to unleashing.

GRIND

Coffee: Grind beans just before brewing.  The proper grind depends on your brewing method. 

Education:  The proper grind in education depends not on your brewing method, but on their brewing method.  We need to throw away our ideas and perceptions of what education should look like and stay more in tune with how our children learn best.  This goes far beyond kinestic, auditory, etc.  This goes to their passions, dreams, desires and hopes.  No doubt we must help guide them, but we do not necessarily have to direct them.  Do more asking than telling.  Dig deep to learn the whys behind the whats.  Look at the journey from their perspective and brew the education in the method best for them.

For coffee, “grind” pertains to our brewing method.  For education, grind pertains to their brewing method.

PROPORTION

Coffee:  We recommend 2 Tbsp ground coffee for every 6 fl oz water.

Education:  Youth is more than books or lessons, even online lessons.  Let’s commit to giving our children the time to be kids.  Adulthood will come quickly enough, why rush it?  So, as we undertake this journey with our children, let’s make sure we are spending adequate time playing with them.  Let’s allow them time to play, to grow, to experience, to fail, to enjoy childhood.  In doing so, it will help us maintain a proper proportion between the learning that needs to take place and the learning that takes place anyway.

For coffee, proportion pertains to coffee and water.  For education, proportion pertains to structured learning and experiential learning.

WATER

Coffee:  The water you use in your coffee should be clean, fresh and free of impurities.

Education:  Now, it would be too easy here to talk about the K¹² curriculum and how it relates to the quality of the water you use for coffee, but I want to transcend that and talk more about the quality of the time you spend with your children during this journey.  And, in my opinion, it all starts with attitude.  A favorite author of mine, Chuck Swindoll, described the importance of attitude in his book, Strengthening Your Grip:

“Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitude toward life.  The longer I live the more convinced I become that life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we respond to it. 

I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude.  It alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope.  When my attitude is right, there’s no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great for me.”

To me, the quality of the attitude we bring to each day will determine the quality of our journey.  Let’s keep our attitude each day clean, fresh and free of impurities.

For coffee, it is the water that counts.  For education, it is our attitude that counts.

Thanks for joining me on this adventure.  My hope is that it assists you in some way towards making your educational journey a better one.

It took a special kind of teacher to be able to handle me. I made that point in an earlier post, but I’d like to use the thinktanK blog as a way for all of us to give a nod to the special teachers in our lives. The educators who made a difference for me are professionals whose love for teaching was surpassed only by their superhuman patience—and in a couple of cases by their capacity to administer tough love.   First up for me is Mr. Mullen.

He was my English teacher in the 12th grade at Robinson Secondary School. This was a guy who let you take almost any approach to a project, as long as it represented actual scholarship. When we had to take turns reciting Beowulf one semester, two students decided to make a rap song out of it—in the original Old English. (This was back when this was relatively new.) (Rap, I mean. Not Old English.) As one student did the “beatbox” thing, the other student performed the rap. It was unconventional, to say the least. We all sort of raised our eyebrows and looked at Mr. Mullen for

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I’ve been lucky. I work for K¹². I worked for NASA. I taught some of the best students in physics and math at several schools. But a couple weeks ago, they came.

The First Day of School Nerves.

My son, who is in 8^th grade and is a home learner, got them too. Make no mistake, it has been awesome to have so many moments that we have shared in the past. Times at the Franklin Institute in the rain, or at the Solar Decathlon are times that we will always remember. But on that Monday evening (due to Labor Day it was not Sunday), he came to me and said “Dad, should I be scared?” My 6 ft, 2 inch son who is 12 years old and who has me as his teacher wanted to know if he should be “scared”!

I have to admit I felt it too. We might be seen as ready, polished veterans of home learning. It makes me wonder where it comes from…why do students, parents and teachers have those jitters? The answer that I reflected on made sense but provided little comfort at first.

In our culture we draw such a distinction between learning and education. Learning happ

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One of the great parts of being in a cyber school is that there is a constant desire to become better as a school, as families, and as a teacher. Each year something is changed in order to help make the curriculum better, make the technology more accessible or help the school progress. This year our school has been focusing on making visits to our students’ homes.

I have had some amazing experiences visiting with my students this year—and I mean amazing in every sense of the word. I have had crazy dogs attack, crazy siblings attack, security checkpoints, homes with no cell phone or GPS reception, and directions that included, “that dirt road has no name but if you go on it until it bends up a hill then you turn on another dirt road with no name.” I have also met the most amazing families with so many things different but one thing in common: Their previous schools were not meeting the needs of their children, and they have chosen to come to a cyber school.

I had one visit this week that was a wonderful experience, because it showed me what one successful family was doing to remain successful, and they said some things that make reflect on one very important aspect of being an online teacher.

To be successful they had a workspace for each of their children. While t

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As prospective mayor Vincent Gray’s education advisors begin to discuss changes in the way Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee ran D.C. schools, it should quickly become apparent they should keep their hands off one of Rhee’s smartest moves — handing management of Coolidge and Dunbar high schools to a sharp team of educators from New York City.

Lost in all the primary election skirmishing over teacher dismissals and conflicting test score data was this encouraging statistic: under the Friends of Bedford group, in just its first year here, the portion of students testing proficient or advanced in reading went from 38 percent to 53.6 percent at Coolidge and from 18.2 percent to 31.9 percent at Dunbar. No other high school in the city came close to making such gains in a subject where improvement here has been rare.

The three Bedford partners I discussed this with at their office at Dunbar are a wily bunch. Their leader George Leonard has known his partners Niaka (pronounced Na-KEE-ya) Gaston and Bevon Thompson since they were his star biology students at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. They

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Recent blog posts from K¹² colleagues jump-started my thoughts about the information age and butterflies. So, how do those beautiful winged creatures relate to technology in the 21st century? As Stephanie noted, it was one of those small beauties that reminded her to stop and notice what’s around her. If you have children, you undoubtedly remember moments when they tugged persistently on your shirtsleeve to get your attention, saying something like, “Look, Mommy, what’s that?” What your child was pointing to could have been a fuzzy caterpillar crawling underfoot, a glistening rock on the edge of a stream, or even a pile of deer droppings. Whatever it was, your child was interested, your child wanted to know more, your child wanted to share her observations with you, and your child wanted your attention at that very moment.

As a parent, you are your child’s first teacher. You also play a powerful role in helping your child appreciate the power of observation, the first step in “doing science.” In fact, that’s where all learning begins. From infancy onwa

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